Someone once said, “If you preach about pain, you’ll never lack an audience.” My own experience, both in the pew and in the pulpit, confirms the truism. The reason is intuitively obvious: the current of suffering passes through every life, leaving among the ruins in its wake the Great Question, “Why?” The whole human race, it seems, is seeking an answer.
Our credibility as ministers of the gospel–and, by extension, the credibility of our gospel as a body of teaching and as God’s message to the cosmos–hangs on the answers we offer to this universal question of suffering. If people find our answers to this question unsatisfactory, they will (rightly, I think) reject off hand the answers we might offer to any other questions they ask. In his new book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer, Bart Ehrman (Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) describes how his own search for an answer led him away from evangelical Christianity and, ultimately, to agnosticism. (Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air interviewedDr. Ehrman this week; you can listen to the interview and read an excerpt from Ehrman’s book here.)
I can relate to Ehrman’s journey. My own questions formed in the fire of the pain brought about by feeling like a woman in a world and a church that required me to be a man. Why would God do such a thing to me? As I wrote in the ”coming out” letter I sent to some of my dearest and most respected Christian friends,
For most of my life, I believed that this deep impulse I felt to live as a woman was sin or sickness, and I prayed fervently for God to heal me. The fact that God did not heal me, in spite of all my pleading, led two years ago to the most profound crisis of faith I have ever experienced. There seemed to be three possible explanations. My prayers had gone unanswered because (1) God did not actually exist, (2) God felt no compassion for my suffering, or (3) my feelings were neither sick nor sinful, and I was free to seek a way to integrate them into my life.
As one of my friends who received my letter was quick to remind me, there is another possible explanation. Perhaps my being transgender was something akin to the burden the apostle Paul refered to as his “thorn in the flesh.”
In order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. (2 Cor 12:7b-11)
Reading these words over the years, I wondered if perhaps feeling myself to be a woman, feeling discomfort at being forced to exist in the world as a man, was my thorn in the flesh. Was it simply my cross to bear? Read the rest of this entry »
